Critics Film Ratings Versus Audience's Reviews
Users Rate Action Films Higher than Critics on RottenTomatoes.com
Oct 9, 2008
In the past when people wanted to know if they should see a movie on the big screen or wait for it to come out on video, they talked to friends, read reviews in newspapers and magazines, and caught snippets of feedback on television.
Today, audiences still consult all of those sources, but technology has added another: the internet. Increasingly, our small world shrinks with a click here and a double-click there. We are caught in the World Wide Web.
One Website
One site, Rotten Tomatoes (located at rottentomatoes.com), provides a respite from the frenzy for film-going folk trying to find a worthwhile flick for Friday night.
Rotten Tomatoes receives reviews from one to two hundred or more accredited critics for nearly all new films. The basic tool gauging critics’ responses to films asks them to give a positive or negative rating to films. In addition to a more standard rating out of ten (i.e. 7.4/10), the site compiles the positives and negatives, which it refers to as fresh or rotten, into a percentage of positive ratings compared to the total.
For example, three positive reviews and one negative review combine for a 75% positive (75% fresh/25% rotten) rating. Rotten Tomatoes calls the rating system its Tomatometer. The site gives a stamp of approval for films that score highly; “Rotten Tomatoes awards the Certified Fresh accolade to theater releases reviewed by 40 or more critics […] that score at least 75% or higher on the Tomatometer. A film remains Certified Fresh unless its Tomatometer falls below 60%.”
In addition to critics’ ratings, the site invites the community to respond. A separate fresh or rotten rating reveals how the site’s users feel about a film. Comparatively, a film reviewed by one hundred critics might be rated by as many as one thousand or more users. Comparing the Tomatometer results from critics versus users reveals very interesting results.
One Genre, One Sample
Looking at twenty films released since the year 2000 in the action/adventure genre exposes a consistent disparity between the critics and the site users. In a list that includes all three members of the Bourne trilogy, both newer Batman films, as well as I, Robot and Déjà Vu, only five films received a fresher rating from the critics- four of those five being within three percentage points of the users.
To be fair, users gave a similar slim advantage to an additional two films bringing the number of films scoring within five points of each other to six of twenty. The resulting thirteen films scored an average of 66% from the critics (all films in the sample received better than 50% ratings from both sides) and 82% from the users. Why so different?
A larger sample with more controls may refine the numbers one way or another, but users clearly appear to enjoy the action/adventure genre much more than the critics. How do critics influence audiences? Will users respond with their opinions as often if they do not enjoy a film? Just how good is a film really?
Well, what did you think?
